Anneke Newman, Author at International Research Network for the Study of Science and Belief in Society

The prayer economy and situated perceptions of economic utility: understanding preference for Qur’anic schools

Project aim: AN will draft a chapter titled “The prayer economy and situated perceptions of economic utility: understanding preference for Qur’anic schools” as part of a monograph titled “Decolonising education in Islamic West Africa: Cultural politics of religion, gender, and school preference”. Research questions: According to development actors in Senegal, versus parents and youth, what is the economic utility of secular education compared to that of Qur’anic schooling? What factors explain the differences in perceptions between these two groups? What are the implications of these divergent logics for theories of school preference and education policy? Need for the project: This chapter responds to calls from postcolonial scholars that we uncover and challenge Euro/American-centric biases in scientific models of religious behaviour. This chapter addresses this in relation to preference for religious education, using the example of Islamic schools in Senegal. Throughout the Islamic world, Qur’anic schools – teaching memorization of the

A 19th century script of the opening verse of the Qur'an written in the Sudani Script

Making sense of Qur’anic school preference in West Africa

The challenges of secular bias and ontological injustice in scientific theories of educational decision-making Dr Anneke Newman, Université Libre de Bruxelles The remit of the INSBS is to study the relationships between ‘science’ and ‘belief’ in society. Yet what if the very conceptualization of these terms—and the tools social scientists have at their disposal to study these dynamics—were far from neutral, but instead privilege secular ontology and epistemology, leading to profound misinterpretations of the experiences and motivations of people of faith? This article—inspired by my forthcoming monograph, and generously funded by an INSBS Early Career Mentoring Grant—argues that secular ontological bias is endemic within the Western social sciences, and constitutes an ontological injustice (Wilson, 2017). I unpack how this bias manifests in relation to theorizing around educational decision-making—particularly preference for faith-based schools, using examples from the strongly Islamic context of northern Senegal—and the causes and implications of this bias. [S]ecularism’s